Midsummer

Cambridge, MA, 2008

Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.
A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,

A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:
The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattened-honey not for babes.

All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled
Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor

Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.
Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.

On your fingers, the residue...

October Aubade

If I slept too long, forgive me.

A north wind quickened the window frames
so the room pitched like a moving train

and the pillow's whiff of hickory
and shaving soap conjured your body

beside me. So I slept in the berth
as the train chuffed on, unburdened

by waking's cold water, ignorant
of pain, estrangement, hunger and

the crucial fuel the boiler burned
to keep the minutes' pistons churning

while I slept. Forgive me.

That Kind of Happy, the long-awaited second collection by award-winning poet Maggie...

from "Mount Fuji"

A draughtsman's draughtsman, Hokusai at 70
thought he'd begun to grasp the structures

of birds and beasts, insects and fish, of the way
plants grow, hoped that by 90 he'd have
penetrated to their essential nature.

And more, by 100, I will have reached the stage
where every dot, every mark I make will be
alive. You always loved that resolve, you'd repeat

joyfully-Hokusai's utterance of faith
in work's possibilities, its reward, that,
at 130, he'd perhaps have learned to draw.

Gail Mazur's...

From Let Me Hear You

Outside is inside now.
The pyramid whose point
we are is weightless
and invisible
and has become itself the night
in which alone
together
on a high plateau
we go on shouting
out whatever name
those winds keep blowing back
into the mouth that's shouting it.

Alan Shapiro's newest book of poetry is situated at the intersection between private and public history, as well as individual life and the collective life of middle-class America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether writing about an aged and...

From Ritual

A slow parade of old west enthusiasts,
camp song and hymn, came in along the winding

way where rural declined to suburban, slow
riders and wagoners passing a cow staked

to graze, some penned cattle looking vacantly
up--not in vacant lots the ancient icons

of wealth they had been in odes, prayers and epics,
in sacrifices and customs of bride-price

or dowry. (It's good people no longer make
blood sacrifices, at gas stations and stores,

for example, and in the crunching gravel
parking lots of small churches--oh but we...

Called "the master of the poetic one-liner" by the New York Times, acclaimed poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz takes his characteristic tragicomic view of life to some unexpected and disturbing places in this, his fourth book of poetry. Here are poignant and comic poems about personal loss--the mysterious disappearance of his oldest friend, his mother's failing memory, a precious gold ring gone missing--along with uneasy love poems and poems about family, identity, travel, and art with all of its potentially recuperative power. Humane, deeply moving, and curiously hopeful, these poems are...

This moving prose poem tells the story of an aged man who suffers a prolonged and ultimately fatal illness. From initial diagnosis to remission to relapse to death, the experience is narrated by the man's son, a practicing doctor. Charles Bardes, a physician and poet, draws on years of experience with patients and sickness to construct a narrative that links myth, diverse metamorphoses, and the modern mechanics of death. We stand with the doctors, the family, and, above all, a sick man and his disease as their voices are artfully crafted into a new and powerful language of illness.

There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell's fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns socially outward and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be...